The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (49 page)

The
CPR
not only persuaded its men to vote for Conservative candidates (and made sure that the Liberal-minded employees did not get to the polls) but it also pumped large sums of money into Conservative election funds. In 1890, Stephen somewhat ruefully reminded the Prime Minister of that fact. Since 1882, he said, he had “personally and otherwise, through Pope
alone
spent over one million dollars” and added that in the previous election, at the moment when the Grand Trunk was being promised a subsidy for a line between Toronto and Ottawa, he was wiring J. H. Pope a remittance of two hundred thousand dollars to save the day. Macdonald’s advice, given in the heat of the critical loan debate of 1884, that the
CPR
“must
become political,” certainly bore fruit.

For George Stephen, watching that debate from the galleries one day
and hurrying back to Montreal to stave off creditors the next, the political arguments dragged on interminably. The president wanted another extension on his Bank of Montreal loan but, in spite of Tupper’s intercession, the bank refused. On February 27, 1884, the
CPR
president wrote another desperate note to the Prime Minister:

“McIntyre goes down to N.Y. tonight to raise by way of a loan for a few days $300,000 which we think will keep us out of the sheriff’s hands till Tuesday or Wednesday. I hope he will manage this, though he may not be able. In that case I do not know what we shall do.…”

The following day, the
CPR
relief bill passed the House. How soon could Macdonald get it through the Senate? Again. Stephen implored the Prime Minister to move swiftly. It would have to be made law by Wednesday, when McIntyre’s short-term loan (negotiated successfully in New York) fell due; and on Wednesday, dramatically, it was done. At the very last moment the company had been saved from ruin. That final denouement was reminiscent of one of the cheap, yellow-backed thrillers that Macdonald liked to read to clear his mind from the cares of the day.

Those cares were very real ones. The Prime Minister was in his seventieth year and was complaining more and more of being tired every night. When he had driven the original
CPR
contract through Parliament in 1881 he had believed his main worries to be at an end, at least as far as the railroad was concerned. Stephen, he thought, would take the responsibility off his back. But the railroad, which was wearing Stephen down too, was pressing upon Macdonald’s stooped shoulders like a great weight, as it had a dozen years before in the days of Sir Hugh Allan and the first, abortive Canada Pacific Company. “He is the slave to the
C.P.R
. Syndicate, and dare not do anything they dislike,” the
Globe
was declaring. This was not true, but he
was
a slave to the railway idea; until the last spike was driven, there would be no relief. Once again the papers were hinting that he would retire and accept for himself the job of high commissioner in London – he was suffering once again from an old nervous disease, inflammation of the stomach; but he could not retire while the railway remained unfinished. “It is only because I want to be
in
at the completion of the
CPR
that I remain where I am,” he had told Stephen the previous November. “…  I may say I groan for rest.”

By the summer of 1884, Macdonald was worried that Stephen himself might give in. “I would leave the Govt tomorrow,” he admitted to Tupper in July, “if it were not that I really think George Stephen would throw up the sponge if I did. He was so worried & sleepless that his wife became alarmed.” The Prime Minister insisted that Stephen go off
to the seaside for a vacation. A few days later, he himself came down to visit him, and for three days the two men on whom so much depended basked in the sun and talked about the railroad and the future of the country. Macdonald thought Stephen had “chirped up a good deal” as a result of his rest. He would need to, to survive the trials that lay ahead.

*
Davin did not realize much from this gift: shortly after he received the lots the real estate bubble broke and he could not sell them. As a result he was forced to mortgage his newspaper.

*
Hill’s biographer, Pyle, does not give this as a reason, citing only Hill’s preoccupation with his own railroad, but both John Murray Gibbon, in the CPR’s quasi-official history,
Steel of Empire
(Gibbon was public relations officer for the company at the time), and Vaughan, Van Horne’s biographer, specifically state that Hill left because of the Lake Superior decision. Though a final judgement must await the opening of Hill’s papers in 1981, his departure was unexpected enough to surprise Stephen. It is reasonably clear from his action that, although more than half the voting stock of the CPR was held by American investors, the control of the railway was in Canadian hands. It would have been in the American interest to have abandoned or postponed the Lake Superior line.

Chapter Seven

1
The armoured shores of Superior

2
Treasure in the rocks

3
The Big Hill

4
“The ablest railway general in the world”

5
The Pacific terminus

6
Not a dollar to spare

7
1The edge of the precipice

1
The armoured shores of Superior

The price of building the line north of Lake Superior was appalling. One ninety-mile section ate up ten million dollars, and one single, memorable mile of track was laid through solid rock at a cost of seven hundred thousand. By the summer of 1884, John Ross had close to fifteen thousand men and four thousand horses working between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay; every month the company sent a pay car out along the line with $1,100,000 in wages. The awesome quantities of food consumed by the workmen flabbergasted old-time traders. Gilbert Spence, a squaw man working for the Hudson’s Bay Company near Peninsula Harbour, “seemed somewhat upset” when Harry Armstrong, the engineer, told him that the navvies in the vicinity were consuming twelve tons of food a day and using four tons of tobacco a month. At that point the country was so primitive that Spence’s wife had never seen a horse or cow or even heard of a telegraph line. But all this was about to change. As the Thunder Bay
Sentinel
(Michael Hagan’s old paper) put it in June: “That which has been hitherto a howling wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, will in the course of a few months resound with the rush and bustle of railway life.” The amount of explosives required to blast through the Precambrian cliffs was staggering. To save money and time, Van Horne had three dynamite factories built in the Caldwell-Jackfish area, each capable of turning out a ton a day. The bill for dynamite, nitro-glycerine, and black powder came to seven and a half million dollars.

The line hugged the armoured shores of Lake Superior, where construction was heavy but supply relatively easy. Van Horne had ordered three big lake boats built in Scotland, each with a burden of two thousand tons and a speed of fifteen knots. Two were delivered in 1883 but the third capsized in the middle of the Clyde during the launching ceremonies, drowning one hundred workmen. The others, on arrival at Montreal, were cut in two and reassembled on the upper lakes in time to do duty between Algoma Mills and Thunder Bay in the early summer of 1884. In this way freight could be shipped by water from Montreal to Port Arthur and by rail from Port Arthur to Winnipeg – a distance of 1,320 miles – in sixty-six hours. This was the start of the Canadian Pacific Steamship service, under Henry Beatty, whose son was to become president of the
CPR
at a time when it was able to advertise itself as “The World’s Greatest Travel System.”

The company, through its control of the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway, also had a port at Owen Sound on Georgian Bay. From there, supplies were shipped forward and distributed at points one hundred miles apart along the north shore of Superior. Rough portage roads had to be blasted between each delivery point to bring provisions to the tracklayers. Much of this transportation was done in winter when the lakes were frozen and the snow packed hard as concrete. It required three hundred dog teams, working incessantly, to keep the railroad supplied.

To Stephen, watching every penny in Montreal, the whole operation must have been disturbing. This was the section that almost everybody, Stephen included, had once said should not be built. This was the section that had caused Hill’s disaffection – and Kennedy’s. Now it was devouring the millions that the company had managed to pry loose from Ottawa. In May, John Ross was brought to a meeting in Montreal to see if the vast army of men, crawling over the sombre rock of the Shield, could be cut back. It was not really possible. To get his loan Stephen had promised that the job would be completed in five years instead of ten; they had to press on with it.

There was no thought of stopping for winter. Track must be laid in all seasons, in snow five feet deep and in temperatures that dropped to forty and fifty degrees below zero. Sometimes the drifts were so high that in the absence of an embankment it was impossible to locate the centre line of the roadbed, the markers themselves being hidden. At first the contractors sent gangs of men ahead with shovels to try to locate the route, but this wasted too much time and held up construction. In the end, the ties and rails were laid directly on top of the snow, the centre being determined by the perimeter of the clearing. Sometimes, when spring came, it was found that the rails had not been laid on the grade at all.

All sorts of short cuts were attempted. There was one rock cutting seven hundred feet long and thirty feet deep, about ten miles east of White River, on which the contractors were well behind. A delay of a month or more seemed inevitable until it was decided to lay the track directly on top of the rocky escarpment, to one side of the half-finished cut. It was not easy to get a locomotive over this barrier. The first that attempted to reach the top slipped back. The rails were sanded and the track smoothed out a little until finally a single car was pulled over safely. When the engine crews grew used to the hazard they were able to cross it easily with two cars. By the time the cut was finished, track had moved on thirty miles.

In the interests of greater speed, Van Horne imported a track-laying machine. This was really a train loaded with rails, ties, and track fastenings.
Shallow, open-top chutes, with rollers spaced along the bottom, were hung on either side, and the ties and rails were rolled along by manpower to the front of the device, where they were manhandled onto the grade. Joint bars and bolts accompanied the rails, which moved along on one side of the machine, while the track spikes, in long narrow boxes, together with the ties, were rolled along on the other side. (In later years the rollers were powered by machinery.)

The usual method of cut and fill was abandoned in the interests of saving money. It would have cost more than two dollars a cubic yard to cut through the hills and fill up the hollows with teams hauling the rock and gravel thus removed. Van Horne had decided at the outset to carry the line high, building timber trestles over the intervening valleys, gullies, and clefts, and filling them in later with materials brought in by rail rather than by the more expensive teams. The cost of these trestles was about one-tenth the cost of the filling operation.

To Alan Brown, a pioneer in Ontario railway development, “the rock cuttings were wonderful.” Brown, who travelled the line shortly after it was completed, said he felt weak in his powers of description: “It is impossible to imagine any grander construction.… Everything is synonymous with strength.… The bridges, the tunnels, the rock cuttings almost make you aghast, and after seeing the tunnel work I was not surprised to think that the Hon. Alexander McKenzie at one time spoke of them as ‘impassable barriers’.… What has been done in that part of the line proves that nothing is impassable or impossible in engineering and construction.”

The blasting of the Shield was done, as always, at a considerable cost in men’s lives. A stabler invention, dynamite, had largely replaced the more dangerous nitro-glycerine that had caused so many deaths on the Thunder Bay-Red River line. But even dynamite, carelessly handled, can bring tragedy. One man tried to pack a dynamite cartridge tighter by tamping it down with an iron crowbar; he was blown to pieces. A hotel proprietor from Port Arthur on a fishing expedition reached into the water and encountered a live discarded dynamite cap among the rocks; it blew his hand off. In another instance a man asleep in a cabin near McKay’s Harbour was killed when a rock from a blast tore through the roof and crushed him.